November 2016

Justice & Reparations for Ricky Bishop – march through Brixton

November is now complete on My London Diary. It’s a month I remember for being dark, cold and wet, certainly not my favourite time of year. I hate it when we change the clocks at the end of October, plunging into darkness around 4pm – by the end of the month sunset was at 3.55pm. London did get more rain than in the average November and most of it seemed to fall on me and my cameras.

It was also the month when my Nikon D700 more or less gave up the ghost. I can’t complain as it has made well over 500,000 exposures, but repair costs are so high now that it is almost certainly beyond economic repair. It is still actually working – at least at times. I took my last image with the D700 at a protest a few minutes after the image above, taken on a D810. That last D700 image has the shutter count information:

<aux:ImageNumber>532697</aux:ImageNumber>

embedded into its EXIF information (you can, with difficulty find this Photoshop.) According to Nikon the carbon fiber composite shutter in the D700 should at least last 150,000 exposures.

It isn’t actually the shutter but the mirror that is the problem – it sticks in the up position, blanking out the viewfinder. It happened first around half an hour or so earlier but I managed to free it by using the menu to ‘Lock mirror up for cleaning’, then switching the camera off and back on again, but after a few exposures stuck again and I had to repeat the process. I missed a few opportunites to make pictures doing this, particularly annoying when the police came to interfere with the protest.

Back home, and testing the shutter it has been working perfectly, but a camera you can’t rely on isn’t worth carrying. And I am fairly sure the cost of repairs (and there are a number of other minor faults) would be prohibitive. So since then I’ve been working with the D810 and a D750, which I’d tried out a few days earlier. The D750 is a noticeably lighter, which is good, gives larger files – sometimes a bonus, but normally unnecessary – and has a tilting read screen, which is great for some things, though the ‘Live View’ you need to use is still clunky. And it somehow feels a bit cheap and has a nasty shutter sound compared to the D700.

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